Pleasantville: Tim Elliott's parents, Max and Rosemary, in Sydney in the early 1950s. Photo: courtesy of Tim Elliott

I've heard it said that when someone dies, the first thing we forget is the sound of their voice, but my father has been dead now for 26 years and I can still hear him as if it were yesterday. I can hear him singing in the shower, I can hear him laughing, I can even hear him pouring a drink. But most of all I can hear him screaming and ranting, tearing the house down with his big broken heart, making it quake with his rage and sadness.

My father was a large man, more than six feet tall and built like a minor mountain range. He had played rugby union for Australia in the 1950s, something I was, and remain, crazily proud of. He was also a doctor, and a very good one. He had worked in London, and spent the last 15 years of his life as the head of the chest section at Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital, where the nurses and registrars referred to him as "Mad Max". Even now, in the course of my job, I still run across people who remember him. Oh, you're Max Elliott's son! A wonderful man, they say. A lovely man. Such a "character".

In good times and in bad: Max and Rosemary on their wedding day in 1956. Photo: courtesy of Tim Elliott

"Character" is one way to put it. Out of his mind is another way. These days, Dad would be diagnosed as bipolar; back then, he was known as manic depressive. Dad's mood didn't just swing, it careened and looped, it ploughed through the house like a runaway rollercoaster, smashing down walls, clearing out corridors, unhinging doors. My father on a high was utterly shameless; it was like watching someone make love to the cosmos, on stage, before an ovation of angels. He could be blindly generous and rabidly inappropriate. He would take his clothes off; he would dance. He loved parties and good arguments and music. He cried easily. His idea of the best joke ever was to throw himself on the floor of a crowded restaurant, pretending to be dead, and get us to do the same.

Most of the time, though, Dad was not "up" but "down". Very down. So down, in fact, that he was subterranean, a frothy-mouthed, tooth-grinding black hole of fury, a typhoon made of flesh, stalking the house, naked, testicles like bell clappers, drinking gin and roaring. He would threaten suicide; he would attempt suicide; he would try to strangle me; he would throw my older brother out of the house; he would threaten my older sisters; he would chase our mother around the living room with a carving knife.

All together then: The Elliott family in 1974 - (from left) Gina, Rob, Max, Rosemary, Tim and Camilla. Photo: courtesy of TIm Elliott

Dad was also a workaholic and a narcissist, two unhappy traits that converged with his innate gift for melodrama to make him into a truly world-class martyr. There was no calamity or casual piece of bad luck that Dad could not place himself at the centre of, no person more affected by any unfortunate circumstance.

"I have worked myself into the grave so you can go to good schools," he would say, "so you can live in this big beautiful house/eat that steak dinner/put petrol in that car." He would stand over the toilet, late at night, and scream for us to come and inspect the blood in the bowl - a product, he said, of the cirrhosis of the liver that was right now in the process of killing him. "I AM DYING!" he would yell. "I WILL BE DEAD IN A YEAR!"

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But I loved him. I worshipped him. He was my father, a titan, a colossus, a maker and a destroyer. In 1953, when touring with the Wallabies in South Africa, he shot a springbok and a blesbok on a hunting trip. He brought their heads back and had them mounted on our dining room wall. Over time, the blesbok rotted, and we had to throw it out. But the springbok I still have. It's on a wall in my home now, with a Hawaiian lei slung around its neck for ironic effect. Bok's ears are frayed but its fur is soft. It has big black horns like question marks, and a slender neck, and a strange, coy little smile.

It is a creature of uncommon beauty, and Dad had shot it straight through the heart.

I have two early memories of Dad. One is of him teaching me to swim, in Fiji, where we sometimes went for family holidays. I can see his huge face and wavy hair, and his hands stretching toward me, just out of reach. "Keep going," he is saying. "Swim towards me." I swim and I swim, but his hands pull away, always staying just out of reach.

The other is of Dad, sitting in the dining room at home, toward the end of a long, boozy dinner party. I am about seven or eight. There's a handful of men, possibly his football mates, arranged around the table like Easter Island statues, all busted noses and booming voices. Spotting me wandering in, Dad turns, his face demented, and yells: "TAKE DOWN YOUR PANTS AND SHOW US YOUR BALLS!" If I'd been even slightly older, this wouldn't have bothered me. Instead, I stand there, waiting - praying - for the walls to fall in and thereby save me.

I am the youngest of four children. My brother, Rob, is 11 years older. Then come two middle sisters, Gina and Camilla. We lived in a beautiful big house in Mosman, overlooking the bay on Sydney Harbour, that Mum and Dad bought for £11,000 in 1965. The house was old and mysterious. It had black shingles and terracotta tiles, lots of hidden corners, and a circular balcony where we would sit, at sunset, and watch giant black bats fly across the sky. If the wind blew the right way, you could hear the lions roar at Taronga Zoo during feeding time.

I loved that house exactly as if it were a part of me, and I loved the bay, which had a particular sound, of clinking rigging, and lots of little waves licking oyster-covered rocks. When the ferries rumbled in, their engines made the whole house shudder.

Mum told me that she'd had suspicions about Dad's sanity for years, but his terminal deterioration, his dive-bomber-like plunge into oblivion, began around the time I came along. There was, therefore, no period in which I can remember him being "normal". But I must have been about seven when it first dawned on me, conclusively, like a flicked switch, that something wasn't right.

We were all sitting around watching TV, laughing at an episode of M*A*S*H, when I happened to glance at Dad, and notice, confusedly, that he wasn't laughing. He wasn't even smiling. Rather, he was grinding his teeth, and looked to be in some kind of low-level agony, or as if he were watching another show on another channel, a show that was not in the slightest bit funny.

Dad was a romantic. He loved poetry, sunsets; Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata was one of his favourite pieces of music. But when it came to work he was a brutalist, a haircloth penitent, flogging himself to a bleeding pulp. He would leave for work before I got up, returning after I'd gone to bed. Then, because he always had More Work To Do, he would set up office at the kitchen table, dictating his excruciatingly detailed patient histories and examining X-rays, wobbling them up to the wall light and squinting at them through his big, square, gold-framed glasses. This he would do until 11pm or midnight or 1am or 2am. Sometimes I would wander into the kitchen to get something and give him a hug. Or not, depending on his mood.

Then, later at night, I would find myself awake, lathered in sweat, and hear him downstairs, roaring like the wolf in the Three Little Pigs, about to blow our house down. Camilla and I would wander to the top of the stairs and huddle there, holding our knees, listening to cupboards being smashed and pots being hurled, and the sound of Mum's watery voice, interjecting, like a moth in a maelstrom, begging him to please please please darling, please calm down and come to bed. It was in one of these rages that he grabbed a recently bought Wiltshire knife - long and sleek and freshly sharp - and went for Mum, pursuing her around the dining room table until she grabbed the blade and slashed her hand. For days afterward, Mum's bandaged palm took precedence in the house, a totem of Dad's transgression, one that shamed him as surely as a whipped dog.

It amazes me how many people these days talk of wanting to beat depression "without drugs and doctors". Dad was not one of these people. He must have seen 20 psychiatrists. There were pills in the bathroom, pills by the bedside: sleeping tablets, anti-depressants, tranquilisers, hypnotics, all with space-agey names: Noctec, Sinequan, Buspar. The cupboard closest to the fridge was entirely devoted to these pills, their canisters stacked in wobbly columns. Some of them made Dad impotent, which infuriated him; others made him dopey. None of them made him happier.

He drank a lot, too. Sometimes brandy (Château Tanunda) but mostly gin, and then always Beefeater, the label of which - those Tower of London guards with their pikes and pleated jackets - still makes me shudder. He would drink, and he would become morose and self-loathing, a loathing that would, like a rogue electrical charge, inevitably seek out the nearest warm body. There would be long, bludgeoning rants about the necessity of hard work, about how ungrateful we were, about what a piteous failure he had been; long, needling excavations of some tiny slight that I or someone else had provided him earlier in the day or the week (or year), something one of us had done or should have done that had annoyed or insulted him or made him sad or anxious or just plain f...ing livid.

Then came the suicide attempts. Looking back, he was really just practising, perfecting his technique; yet it was terrifying all the same. The first time, when I was about eight, I remember him sitting at the kitchen table, slobber-mouthed from some Rohypnol overdose, eyes lolling, and me with my arms around his neck, begging him not to die, kissing his face, lips scratching on his bristly chin. Then the ambulance men, finally, coming to take him away.

As I got older, the attempts intensified. Always with pills and booze, always followed by hospitalisations. Each attempt would leave us exhausted, bewildered and - the hardest of all to handle - angry. I wanted to save him, I wanted to make him happy. But at the same time I hated him; sometimes, in my secret moments, I half hoped he would succeed. (Imagine that! No more hiding him from my friends, no more second-guessing him, no more shame.)

So there was guilt there, too. But most of all there was worry. I know that "worry" seems like a plain word, and a plain, unremarkable emotion, but this worry became a type of psychic infestation, relentlessly intrusive, one that took dominion over everything. At one stage, when I was about 12, Mum and I became so worried about Dad killing himself that we took to following him, like stalkers, driving 50 metres behind him when he went for his daily jog, just so we could be there when he threw himself under a bus.

And so there we were. Mum worrying about Dad, us worrying about Dad and Mum, Mum worrying about us, Dad worrying about himself. When Rob, Gina and Cam were still living at home, this was bearable. But soon they moved out - I couldn't blame them - leaving me marooned with Mum and Dad and all that dread, which somehow assumed an almost physical presence, like a gas or a fog. Sometimes when I opened the front door, I swear I had to push all the harder just to get in, what with all that grief piled up like a snow drift on the inside of the house.

I surfed. I listened to music (I collected records). But my real salvation was dope, which I began smoking in large quantities. Rob had long grown marijuana plants in the garden, with Mum and Dad's tacit consent. (My parents were always wonderfully permissive, something our friends hugely appreciated.) Now I took over, planting a crop in the garden below my window. Every day I'd come home from school and race down to check my plants, plumping up their bushy leaves, clipping and pruning them like prize poodles.

I came to relish getting stoned: the sweet singeing smoke on the back of my throat, the brief dizziness, then the thrumming warmth that crept, tide-like, up the back of my skull. Many nights I sat in my room, ripped to the gills, listening to records and writing poetry, which Dad, when he was good, would wander in and read, patting me on the head and hugging me.

I will say this much: life was never boring with Dad. He even weirded out our four cats. If he wasn't walking around naked or smashing a hole in his bedroom wall with a chair, he was indulging in midnight feasts, bizarre sleep-eating episodes during which he would consume whole tubs of margarine or an entire packet of corn flakes with tomato sauce.

Then there was his snuff. Despite being a chest doctor, Dad was for some years hopelessly addicted to snuff, which he kept in dainty silver boxes, smaller than a matchbox, with delicately hinged lids. A pinch or two up each nostril. The thing about snuff is that on its way back out of your nose it looks a lot like blood. Mum would try to wash his handkerchiefs, but it was impossible. And so up on the clothes line they'd go, blotched red, like rags from a field hospital.

By the time I was 14, Dad had become too sick to work. The waiting list in his rooms had become untenable. He was also doing things he'd never have dreamed of, shameful things: once he got into a fight with another driver in the hospital car park, and was later caught keying his car. For someone who prided himself on his physical bravery, this was an unbearable ignominy.

So he retired. Initially, this was seen as a good thing. He would have more time to be with Mum and us, more time to travel, go to art galleries, see old friends.

Dad and Mum did go on a few driving holidays, but Dad's retirement proved, for the most part, a disaster. For the depressed person, the concept of leisure time is meaningless. Their anxiety makes it impossible for them to relax, and so all those unchained hours simply get sucked into the grinding maw of fretful melancholy that defines their condition.

Mum searched for projects to divert him. He had always enjoyed short stories - Somerset Maugham, O. Henry - so she encouraged him to write, to describe some of the more interesting medical cases he'd seen, but his writing was hopelessly old-fashioned, and he soon lost interest in it. At one stage, she got a selection of his old rugby photos and hung them in the TV room. Looking back, this seems a strange thing to do - feeding nostalgia to a narcissist - but it was all we could think of.

Nothing worked. And as Dad's depression increased, so, too, did his volatility. He raged, he ranted, he roared; the outlandish highs he had once experienced gave way to unremitting blackness, when he became mired for weeks in swamps of misery, lunging out, like a dying man, to drag us all in with him. We began to worry for Mum's safety. He'd attacked her before, and Mum had told him that if he did it again, she would leave. Yet this was a huge gamble: another woman she knew had recently left her husband, who then killed himself.

Mum and I and the others frequently talked about having Dad committed. Then, when I was about 16, after another suicide attempt, Dad agreed to a short stay in a psychiatric clinic. Mum and I drove him up, checked him in, and stayed with him in his room, talking, Mum stoic, Dad dismal. He said that he would never get better, that it was all "spot-welding", that finally his ship would crack apart altogether. I told him that we loved him and that he had achieved so much; how could he be unhappy? But he didn't care; he wasn't hearing me.

Later that night, after falling asleep, I awoke suddenly, heart hammering, assaulted by a frantic, strangling guilt. Dad was in the hospital, in the dark, in that shitty little room, all alone, while I was here, in this house, under his roof, the puniest kind of traitor, too weak to save him.

As I entered my final year of school, Mum begged Dad to control himself, so that I could study. Incredibly, he complied, at least initially. One night, though, about midway through my last semester, Dad came into my room and said he wanted to know what getting stoned was like. I'd sworn off dope that year but had some saved for after my final exam. Now he wanted to try some of it. I didn't feel in a position to say no, so I rolled him a joint, and he smoked it.

The trouble started about an hour later. Screaming. Muffled crashing. Then Mum's voice, desperate, insistent, yelling for me. I threw open my bedroom door and flew down the stairs, where I found her, in a dressing gown and slippers, bailed up by Dad in a corner near the front door. Mum was small, and she had a scoliosis - a big hump on her back - that made her seem even more vulnerable than she was. I went to move between her and Dad, which is when he grabbed me, his hands around my neck. Mum screamed, then attacked Dad, who let go of me, which is when Mum made a dash for it, out the front door, with me behind.

Our escape up the front-yard steps comes back to me like a ghastly film; soundless, in slow motion. Mum is ahead of me, moving, it seems to me, impossibly slowly. I consider picking her up like a baby and running - that would be faster - but somehow that seems wrong. We make it up one flight of steps, Dad right behind us, then another. When we pass the garden, Dad pauses to pick up a pitchfork.

We reach the street, where, bizarrely, Camilla is waiting in her boyfriend's blue ute, the engine running; I later found out that Mum, anticipating trouble, had phoned and told her to come. We pile into the front seat, Mum, grey-faced, yelling, "Go Millie, go!" I look back and see Dad, standing in the middle of the road, brandishing the pitchfork, chin trembling in aimless rage.

Mum and I spent a week or so living with Rob and his girlfriend. Then, after we all decided that it was unsafe for Mum or I to return, we moved into a rental apartment in nearby Neutral Bay, a two-bedder with a bay window that caught slabs of musty morning sun. I remember that window, because it's where I would sit and listen to music with Mum, holding her hand. We lived there for four months, all through my Higher School Certificate. I continued going to school, but secrecy was imperative: Dad would have come looking had he known where we were. And so none of my friends could know our address. It was like being partly invisible, a kind of double life. Only my girlfriend knew, and Mum had sworn her to secrecy.

We - meaning Rob, Gina, Camilla, and I - visited Dad regularly. Every time he pleaded with us to talk to Mum, to convince her that he posed no threat, that he was sorry, that she should come back to him, that he couldn't go on without her. He gave us long letters to take back to her, sheafs of densely written A4 pages in which he recalled every moment in their marriage, every holiday they'd taken, films they'd seen, books they'd read. He begged, he manipulated. She had to come back - the house was falling apart, her azaleas were dying. He didn't know how to feed himself, he was going crazy with loneliness.

Mum and Dad had been married for more than 30 years. Mum had had one previous boyfriend, whom she confessed to once having kissed. But as far as I know, Dad had only ever been with Mum. Everything he did, he did for her, and to her. Now, the most unnatural thing was happening: they were living apart. Dad became haggard; he stopped shaving and showering. When people phoned, he pretended to be someone else, the pool man or the cleaner. His letters to Mum became more desperate. "I can't bear life without you," he wrote. "Can't you forgive and forget and come back to me?" Then: "It is IMPERATIVE you come back before everything is too late."

Sometimes when I visited he would get nasty, chase me away, threaten to throw my records in the bin. At other times we would talk, then I'd head up to my bedroom, sit staring at the bay, play music and cry so hard I wanted to tear my insides out, or vomit.

Looking back, we must have known, on some deep, unacknowledged level, what would happen. Recently, I have come to see it as a species of murder, or a type of euthanasia. All I know is that one day, March, 23, 1988, Dad didn't answer the phone. Mum and I then arranged to meet Rob at the house. Once we got there, Mum said that she would wait up on the street, that Rob and I should go down to the house first. I remember walking down the garden steps, preparing myself, everything sharp in my field of vision, super-real, and at the same time not real at all.

We found Dad, dead, slumped face-first on the kitchen table. In his right hand was a glass of gin. Blood had leaked from his nose and mouth, spilling over the edge of the table onto the floor, where dozens of empty pill canisters lay strewn about. To my horror, I laughed, possibly because I had no idea what else to do. Rob kicked the wall and swore. Then we called for Mum to come down. She walked in as if entering a minefield; reaching Dad, she put one hand on his shoulder. Then we called the police and waited.

Dad is gone, but he is never gone; he is without life but alive. He's the closest thing I have to an Old Testament God, both vengeful and tender. When he chose death, he placed himself beyond us, leaving behind an unbridgeable distance across which he still stares with those big brown eyes, looking at me and for me, asking to be made whole. For 26 years I've searched for the key that might have made him so, that would have unlocked him and healed him. But, of course, there is no key for people like Dad. There is no answer. There is no peace. This is what he understood and I did not. Dad is still with me, and I'm glad of it. I still love him. He's my father.